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A seemingly endless night permeates Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s masterful and haunting tale of resilience and reckoning with the past.

Vitalina’s husband left Cape Verde for Portugal forty years ago, promising to send her a plane ticket that never eventuated. Unaware that she is now a widow, Vitalina makes her own journey with the intention of finally confronting him. Stepping barefoot from the plane into the inky blackness of Lisbon, she enters a world in which characters come and go, and worn faces add to a poetic chorus of stories about her late husband and the hard life of the city. The film won Locarno Film Festival’s Best Film and Best Actress for Vitalina Varela, a non-actress with an arresting presence who plays herself, recreating her actual story of betrayal, persistence and strength.

Ages 18+ | Contains adult themes